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<h1>Editor&rsquo;s Introduction</h1>

<h2 style="line-height: 36pt; font-weight: bold"
   >PART 1</h2>

<h2 style="font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 3pt"
   >The Ordeal of Richard Feverel:</h2>

<h2 style="margin-top: 3pt"
   >A Textual History, A Necessary Archive</h2>

<h2 style="margin-top: 14pt; margin-bottom: 0.5in"
   >Barbara Heritage</h2>

<p>Today many readers are unacquainted with either the novels or poetry of
George Meredith (1828-1909), who was best known and most widely read at the
end of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries, when he
enjoyed a very bright, but very brief, period of intense, almost Olympian,
fame. In 1905, he was awarded the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. But by
1927, his reputation had begun to diminish, as E. M.  Forster takes pains to
express: &ldquo;Meredith is not the great name he was twenty or thirty years
ago, when much of the universe and all Cambridge trembled [...] Meredith is
himself now in the trough of a wave, and though fashion will turn and raise
him a bit, he will never be the spiritual power he was about the year
1900.&rdquo; <a href="#Footnote1" class="FootnoteLink">1</a> Virginia Woolf
confirms this assessment five years later, but also illustrates the halo
that once surrounded Meredith at the height of his powers:</p>

<blockquote>
His novels had won their way to celebrity through all sorts of difficulties,
and their fame was all the brighter and the more singular for what it had
subdued. Then, too, it was generally discovered that the maker of these
splendid books was himself a splendid old man. Visitors who went down to Box
Hill reported that they were thrilled as they walked up the drive of the
little suburban house by the sound of a voice booming and reverberating
within [...] It did not much matter, perhaps, whether his audience was
cultivated or simple [...] To neither could he speak the simple language of
daily life. But all the time this highly wrought, artificial conversation,
with its crystallised phrases and its high-piled metaphors, moved and tossed
on a current of laughter. His laugh curled round his sentences as if he
himself enjoyed their humorous exaggeration. The master of language was
splashing and diving in his element of words.  So the legend grew
[...]<a href="#Footnote2" class="FootnoteLink">2</a></blockquote>

<p>We see, in Woolf&rsquo;s portrait of the man and his speech, a mirror of
the highly wrought and artificial landscapes of Meredith&rsquo;s novelistic
prose, which often has been criticized for its uneven style and exaggerated,
unrealistic content. As Forster writes: &ldquo;The tailors are not tailors,
the cricket matches are not cricket, the railway trains do not even seem to
be trains [...] It is surely very odd, the social scene in which his
characters are set: it is partly due to his fantasy, which is legitimate,
but partly a chilly fake, and wrong.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote3" class="FootnoteLink">3</a>
Forster&rsquo;s criticism assumes that Meredith&rsquo;s tailors
<span style="font-style: italic">should</span>
be tailors&mdash;that Meredith fails in an attempt to mimetically represent,
as Woolf later writes, the &ldquo;language of daily life.&rdquo; This was a
language that Meredith did not speak, nor one that he sought to imitate. We
find a perfect example of this in
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>.
Woolf writes of the work: &ldquo;He has been, it is plain, at great pains to
destroy the conventional forms of the novel. He makes no attempt to preserve
the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the
usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote4" class="FootnoteLink">4</a></p>

<p class="Indent">Recent critical interpretations of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
focus on precisely this (perhaps seemingly) unstable aspect of the
novel&rsquo;s stylistic presentation, claiming for it an important place
among experimental fiction. Richard C. Stevenson, for instance, finds
Mikhail Bakhtin&rsquo;s concept of the dialogic imagination useful in
understanding the book&rsquo;s vacillating prose, whose
&ldquo;countervailing narrative voices&rdquo; propel the narrative
&ldquo;away from any kind of generic unity to a dizzying mixture of
satire, comedy, romance, and, finally, tragedy.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote5" class="FootnoteLink">5</a>
Along the same lines, one might read the novel as a pastiche, which at every
turn forces readers to confront the ways in which they interpret the modes
and patterns native to writing and reading. In this way, the novel&rsquo;s
formal construction fully embraces and integrates its themes of misreading
and failed human relationships; readers, struggling amidst its various
strains of laughter, cynicism, sentiment, and sorrow along with its numerous
interpolated letters, diaries, songs, and fragments from other texts (not to
mention its myriad references to other literary works) must, in many ways,
relinquish any easy understanding of the narrator&rsquo;s purpose in telling
the story. While works depicted in the novel, such as Sir Austin&rsquo;s
Pilgrim&rsquo;s Scrip and &ldquo;note-book&rdquo; and Dr Kitchener&rsquo;s
&ldquo;Domestic Cookery&rdquo;
book,<a href="#Footnote6" class="FootnoteLink">6</a>
offer concrete instructions and announce themselves as systematic guides, the
novel itself purposefully denies its readers any such key for understanding
<span style="font-style: italic">its </span>
content.</p>

<p class="Indent">These formal and thematic complexities are only
complicated by the history of the text&rsquo;s composition and publication
history. On this subject, Michael Collie&rsquo;s
<span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>
(1974) provides the most accurate and thorough study of Meredith to date.
According to Collie, Meredith wrote
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
between August 1857 and June 1859 while living in Hobury Street in London,
and the novel was published in the typical three-decker format by Chapman
and Hall on June 20, 1859.<a href="#Footnote7" class="FootnoteLink">7</a>
This publication date is corroborated in C. L. Cline&rsquo;s
<span style="font-style: italic">Letters of George
Meredith.</span><a href="#Footnote8" class="FootnoteLink">8</a>
Still, one would like more information on this history. My copy of the 1859
first edition of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
(used extensively for this project and described in more detail on the
&ldquo;Editions&rdquo; page) contains, at the back of volume three, 36 pages
of ads dated April 1859&mdash;an unusually early date, apparently, for
Collie and other sources regularly mention ads dated July 1859, if ads are
present at all.<a href="#Footnote9" class="FootnoteLink">9</a>
The book was marketed, as usual, to circulating libraries; however,
Mudie&rsquo;s Lending Library, which subscribed for 300 copies, withdrew
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
from circulation by October of 1859; according to Meredith, Mudie was
compelled to do this in response to the &ldquo;urgent remonstrances of
several respectable families, who objected to it as dangerous and wicked
and damnable.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote10" class="FootnoteLink">10</a>
The reaction is not entirely surprising when one considers that the
novel&rsquo;s self-proclaimed &ldquo;hero&rdquo; and &ldquo;heroine&rdquo;
marry half way through the book, only for readers to witness the
excruciatingly slow dismantling of what seemed an ideal relationship.
Perhaps one of the funniest accounts one finds of a reader&rsquo;s reaction
is that of the Reverend Augustus Jessop, which Meredith summarizes in a
letter written in November of 1861: &ldquo;One man, head-master of a grammar
school, writes a six-page letter of remonstrance and eulogy [...] He says
that the &ldquo;Enchantress&rdquo; scene in
<span style="font-style: italic">R</span>[<span
      style="font-style: italic">ichard</span>]
<span style="font-style: italic">Feverel</span>
made him ill for 24 hours; and that he and his friends (Cambridge men) rank
me next to Tennyson in poetic power.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote11" class="FootnoteLink">11</a></p>

<p class="Indent">One is not surprised to hear of remonstrance and eulogy
mixed in the same breath. Even during the early stages of writing, Meredith
was fully aware that he was tinkering with the traditional form of the
novel. In January 1858, he reports on the writing of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>:
&ldquo;It goes on so so. Everything I do is an Experiment, and till
it&rsquo;s done, I never know whether &rsquo;tis worth a farthing.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote12" class="FootnoteLink">12</a>
Apparently, Meredith waited a long time: he would revise the text over the
next three decades, settling on a final &ldquo;authorized&rdquo; version
only in 1896. Largely owing to the novel&rsquo;s initial commercial failure
in 1859, it was not republished again until 1875 in Leipzig by Bernhard
Tauchnitz as numbers 1508 and 1509 of the &ldquo;Collection of British
Authors.&rdquo; Meredith, who already in 1873 was complaining of the
novel&rsquo;s &ldquo;offensive&rdquo; &ldquo;lumpy style,&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote13" class="FootnoteLink">13</a>
immediately seized the opportunity to revise the work. This resulted in the
first infamous &ldquo;cut&rdquo; of the novel, in which the first four
chapters&mdash;&ldquo;The Pilgrim&rsquo;s Scrip,&rdquo; &ldquo;A Glimpse
Behind the Mask,&rdquo; &ldquo;Mrs. Malediction,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The
Inmates of Raynham Abbey&rdquo;&mdash;were condensed into one chapter. It is
important to note, with Collie, that Meredith did not remove the famous
&ldquo;Enchantress&rdquo; scene that sickened and distressed so many
readers.  Rather, the changes were connected to structure and
style.<a href="#Footnote14" class="FootnoteLink">14</a>
L. T. Hergenhan characterizes the revisions as largely relating to Sir
Austin&rsquo;s &ldquo;System,&rdquo; to &ldquo;caricatured figures,&rdquo;
to &ldquo;burlesque and satiric scenes,&rdquo; and to &ldquo;exaggerated and
fanciful descriptions of behaviour.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote15" class="FootnoteLink">15</a>
My collation of the 1859 and 1875 versions of the chapter, &ldquo;Indicates
the Approaches of Fever,&rdquo; corroborate this view, though in much more
detail.  Minor edits include regular changes to spelling and contractions
(<span style="font-style: italic">e.g.</span>
&ldquo;were n&rsquo;t&rdquo; to &ldquo;weren&rsquo;t&rdquo;; &ldquo;is
n&rsquo;t&rdquo; to &ldquo;isn&rsquo;t&rdquo;) along with small changes
to punctuation. More significant and most frequent are changes in
capitalization: &ldquo;Baronet&rdquo; changes to &ldquo;baronet,&rdquo;
&ldquo;Parish&rdquo; to &ldquo;parish,&rdquo; &ldquo;Perdition&rdquo; to
&ldquo;perdition,&rdquo; and so on. When &ldquo;Fact&rdquo; becomes
&ldquo;fact&rdquo; and &ldquo;Love&rdquo; turns to &ldquo;love,&rdquo; the
narrator&rsquo;s mode markedly changes from mock- or didactic- or
earnest-philosophical (depending on the context) to a more understated,
ambiguous one; the changes soften the eccentric and exaggerated play in the
narrative&rsquo;s stylistic presentation, and perhaps they were made to draw
readers closer to the novel&rsquo;s story.  Along similar lines, we find
that wily Tom Bakewell&rsquo;s exaggerated dialect is more regularized: for
example, &ldquo;Peninsoolar&rdquo; changes to &ldquo;Peninsular&rdquo; and
&ldquo;speert&rdquo; to &ldquo;spirit,&rdquo; reducing the degree to which
he is caricatured. One large substantive edit occurs in Carola&rsquo;s
speech: an account of her mother&rsquo;s smoking habit is deleted. Again,
the effect is to minimize the more outrageous, burlesque aspects of the
narrative.</p>

<p class="Indent">The text was edited yet again for the second English
edition published by C.  Kegan Paul in 1878, which appeared in one volume
bound in olive green cloth.  (The contract between Meredith and Kegan Paul
also still exists and is held by the Berg Collection at the New York Public
Library; a typewritten agreement dated November 3, 1877, it gives Kegan Paul
copyright to <span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span> for
seven years at the price of 6s., with Meredith to receive 1s. 6d. per copy
after 750 copies sold.)<a href="#Footnote16" class="FootnoteLink">16</a>
Here Collie writes that the Kegan Paul edition &ldquo;is identical, except
in insignificant detail, to Tauchnitz, but it is printed from new
plates.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote17" class="FootnoteLink">17</a>
This description is deceptive; one would think, from reading it, that the
these texts were almost identical. But when one turns to study a chapter in
close detail, one is immediately struck by the different line breaks and
extensively altered punctuation: here colons become semi-colons, there
colons become em dashes; now em dashes disappear entirely, now they are
retained. A contraction becomes uncontracted (e.g.
&ldquo;you&rsquo;re&rdquo; to &ldquo;you are&rdquo;), a question
mark becomes an exclamation mark, and on and on. In short, the punctuation
changes, but is not consistently regularized in any fashion. I have tracked
these details in my edition of &ldquo;Indicates the Approaches of
Fever&rdquo; as they might prove more significant to some than others.</p>

<p class="Indent">The book was published again in 1885 in a one volume
&ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; by Chapman and Hall as part of the first collected
edition of George Meredith&rsquo;s works, and (yet again) Meredith seized
the opportunity to exercise some light revision. The contract for this
agreement, dated June 2, 1885, can be found in the Altschul Collection at
Yale. Chapman and Hall obtained the right to
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
(and four other works) for seven years for £500&mdash;an agreement which
Chapman and Hall would break, by continuing to sell and print copies of the
&ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; after the seven years
elapsed.<a href="#Footnote18" class="FootnoteLink">18</a>
(In 1893, Meredith negotiated a new agreement with the firm that allowed
Chapman and Hall to continue to publish the &ldquo;New Editon&rdquo; for
three more years; in addition, the new contract stipulated that he would
receive a 25 percent royalty on all of the copies that were sold after the
initial seven-year contract for the &ldquo;New Edition&rdquo;
had expired.<a href="#Footnote19" class="FootnoteLink">19</a>)
Collie reports that one can find a copies of the second edition corrected in
Meredith&rsquo;s handwriting in the Altschul Collection at Yale and in the
Houghton Library at Harvard, but that neither appears to have been used as
the basis for the revised 1885
edition.<a href="#Footnote20" class="FootnoteLink">20</a>
According to Collie, the &ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; was printed by three
separate firms: Virtue in 1885 (sold at 6s.); Clowes in 1890 (sold at 3s.
6d.  and bound in blue cloth, instead of the 1885 green); and George Bell in
1895 (often referred to as the &ldquo;Colonial&rdquo; issue [price not given
by Collie]).<a href="#Footnote21" class="FootnoteLink">21</a>
I have collated all three printings in my study of &ldquo;Indicates the
Approaches of Fever.&rdquo;</p>

<p class="Indent">Revisions for this chapter in the &ldquo;New
Edition&rdquo; are rather light&mdash;mainly changes to accidentals rather
than substantives. Collie uncharacteristically makes a blunder when he
writes that the deletion of chapter XIX, &ldquo;A Shadowy View of Cœlebs
Pater Going About with a Glass-Slipper&rdquo; (the chapter devoted to the
Grandisons) &ldquo;did not occur until 1885.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote22" class="FootnoteLink">22</a>
In fact, this deletion first occurs in 1896, and it directly affects our
study of &ldquo;Indicates the Approaches of Fever,&rdquo; as Carola
Grandison, by necessity, is entirely removed from it when the prior chapter
is deleted.  Instead, my work shows that most of the changes were confined
to regularizing punctuation&mdash;specifically, with the deletion of many of
the em dashes in favor of no punctuation and with the splitting of longer
sentences into clauses and phrases by the insertion of additional commas.
Some substantive changes also occur: for example, with respect to
Adrian&rsquo;s description of Lucy&rsquo;s Catholic worship, &ldquo;being
made clean&rdquo; becomes &ldquo;been made clean&rdquo; (this cannot be
considered a correction, as both versions are grammatically correct).
Similarly &ldquo;meditate the day&rdquo; becomes &ldquo;meditate on the
day&rdquo;; again, both are grammatically correct, as &ldquo;meditate&rdquo;
can take the form of a transitive verb. But the transitive use of
&ldquo;meditate&rdquo; is more characteristic of Meredith; the novel&rsquo;s
fabulous last line contains a striking example: &lsquo;&ldquo;This is just
how Richard looks, as he lies silent in his bed&mdash;striving to
<span style="font-style: italic"> image</span> her on his brain [my
emphasis].&rdquo;&rsquo; New errors also occur in the &ldquo;New
Edition,&rdquo; including the misspelling of &ldquo;agricultural&rdquo; as
&ldquo;agriculural&rdquo; and the clumsy handling of &ldquo;wh
ich&rdquo;&mdash;not surprising to one familiar with Meredith&rsquo;s
correspondence, in which he complains to Frederic Chapman in November of
1888:</p>

<blockquote>
As to the New Edition&mdash;the errors of print in this one are horrible.
Let me know the order of the issue, and I will endeavor to make some
corrections, though I can&rsquo;t offer to go through the volumes again. All
of them are thick-sown with blunders. Warn the printer&rsquo;s reader to be
vigilant against the perpetuation of obvious enormities&mdash;such as
<span style="font-style: italic">hedge</span>
for
<span style="font-style: italic">edge</span>
in
<span style="font-style: italic">Feverel.</span>
There is a Latin line in
<span style="font-style: italic">Diana,</span>
correct in the 3 volumes, made absurd in the 1 volume:&mdash;<span
style="font-style: italic">crebis</span>
printed for
<span style="font-style: italic">crebris.</span>
These are mere samples. My friends and some correspondents are noisy over
them.<a href="#Footnote23" class="FootnoteLink">23</a>
</blockquote>

<p>Many of these errors persisted in the 1890 and 1895 Chapman and Hall
copies of the &ldquo;New Edition&rdquo;; in fact, both of those already
mentioned (&ldquo;agriculural&rdquo; and &ldquo;wh ich&rdquo;) still occur
despite other deliberate corrections to the text. One such correction to the
1895 text includes &ldquo;stedfast,&rdquo; which in the 1885 and 1890
&ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; appeared as &ldquo;steadfast.&rdquo; (It is my
view that this was a deliberate change, for the word appears as
&ldquo;stedfast&rdquo; in the 1859 first edition, and it stands in the 1896
Archibald Constable edition, which Meredith carefully revised.) Also,
&ldquo;it,&rdquo; which appears on page 172 in the 1885 and 1890 &ldquo;New
Edition&rdquo; as &ldquo;t&rdquo; (with the &ldquo;i&rdquo; missing by
accident) is corrected in the 1895 &ldquo;New Edition.&rdquo; Because I have
only collated and studied one chapter in detail, it is still unclear whether
the 1890 &ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; is, in fact, a reprinting of the 1885
edition, or whether, like the 1895 &ldquo;New Edition,&rdquo; it also
contains corrections or new variants.</p>

<p class="Indent">A full collation of the 1885, 1890, and 1895 Chapman and
Hall &ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; could potentially shed light on additional
deletions made to the novel, which are mentioned in a letter written by
Meredith to the American publisher Roberts Brothers in February of 1895,
where Meredith warns the publisher of a cut scene that formerly took place
between Mrs Berry and Ripton Thompson after the Richard&rsquo;s
wedding.<a href="#Footnote24" class="FootnoteLink">24</a>
While this firm plays a somewhat minor role in the publishing history of
this novel, it is worth mentioning. According to Collie, Roberts Brothers
initially distributed the Chapman and Hall &ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; in
1886&mdash;buying unbound copies from the English publisher and replacing
the titlepage with their own, marketing the book as the
&ldquo;Author&rsquo;s Edition.&rdquo; The firm bought impressions of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
from Chapman and Hall through 1893, when the Roberts Brothers&rsquo; stock
reports show that the American firm started printing their own copies of the
book, which was issued in two separate
bindings.<a href="#Footnote25" class="FootnoteLink">25</a>
Collie writes that &ldquo;neither Meredith nor Chapman and Hall seem to have
known about the reprinting until after it occurred. The edition has no
textual importance. The plates were later sold to Scribners but not
used.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote26" class="FootnoteLink">26</a>
Whether these books are of significance is debatable. A collation of the
Roberts Brothers text might, in fact, turn up something of interest down the
road. As of yet, I have not collated my copies against the Chapman and Hall,
C. Kegan Paul, and Archibald Constable publications currently available as
electronic documentary editions in this archive, as the latter are undoubtedly
of more importance due to Meredith&rsquo;s known involvement in their
revision (a history which, in itself, also still demands further study).</p>

<p class="Indent">Finally, parts of the book were most famously and
drastically cut in 1896 for the Archibald Constable &ldquo;De Luxe&rdquo;
edition, quarter bound in white cloth, with pink cloth covering the upper
and lower boards. The most substantial change involved the deletion of an
additional chapter (already mentioned earlier in this essay): &ldquo;A
Shadowy View of Cœlebs Pater Going About with a Glass-Slipper&rdquo; (the
chapter devoted to the Grandisons). A direct result of this change was the
large deletion in &ldquo;Indicates the Approaches of Fever&rdquo; of Carola
Grandison and Richard&rsquo;s conversation. But, as we can see in looking at
the revisions and deletions made elsewhere at the chapter, Meredith&rsquo;s
hand was all over the text&mdash;cutting here, rewriting and rewording
there, making changes to substantives and accidentals alike. Single
quotations are consistently exchanged for double quotations and vice versa,
with a few exceptions related to quotations in the 1859 first edition. New
changes tend to streamline the text, continuing the earlier work of reducing
the more burlesque passages and of speeding up the action in the narrative.
Richard&rsquo;s conversation with Tom Bakewell is much tightened and
shorted, for example. For all of these new corrections, it&rsquo;s important
to note that almost all substantive revisions that took place after 1859 are
retained. (The only exception: on page 207 &ldquo;further&rdquo; is
restored, as it originally appeared in the 1859 first edition, from the
[presumably accidental] change made to &ldquo;farther,&rdquo; which appears
in all of the intermediate editions.) Previous revisions to accidentals also
tend to stand, although there are more exceptions. The many mistakes of the
Chapman and Hall &ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; have been corrected.  For
example, on page 214 &ldquo;away&rdquo; comes back, having appeared as
&ldquo;way&rdquo; from 1885-95, and &ldquo;Winter,&rdquo; which had appeared
as uncapitalized &ldquo;winter&rdquo; since 1875, is restored to its
capitalized form as it originally appeared in 1859. Also, the quotation from
The Pilgrim&rsquo;s Scrip, which appeared in italics from 1875 onwards,
appears in the unitalicized Roman type of 1859. An interleaved copy of the
1895 Chapman and Hall &ldquo;New Edition&rdquo; is held by Yale in the
Altschul collection; I hope to view and obtain photographs for this
material, which will be necessary in order to create a proper critical
edition of the 1896 text.</p>

<p class="Indent">The 1896 edition was reissued again in 1897. This edition,
marketed as the &ldquo;revised edition,&rdquo; was bound in a distinctive
deep red cloth. Whether this edition contains additional corrections by
Meredith is unknown to me, and I have yet to collate it against the 1896
edition. I currently own two copies in my collection, and I intend to
address this aspect of the publication history in the near future.</p>

<p class="Indent" style="margin-top: 0.25in">Reviewing the history of all of
these changes, one can see three distinct periods of writing and three
distinct works: the Chapman and Hall first edition of 1859; the Tauchnitz
1875/Kegan Paul second English edition of 1878, in which the first four
chapters are condensed into one and in which substantive edits begin to be
made to other passages in the work; and finally, the Archibald Constable
&ldquo;De Luxe&rdquo; edition of 1896, just described. Currently, no
scholarly critical edition exists for
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel.</span>
The 1909-1911 Memorial Edition of 27 volumes, published by Archibald
Constable, is the closest any edition has come to addressing the
novel&rsquo;s drastic transformation. The Memorial edition of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
is (according to Collie) for the most part &ldquo;virtually the
same&rdquo; text of the revised 1896
edition.<a href="#Footnote27" class="FootnoteLink">27</a>
The set includes a final volume entitled
<span style="font-style: italic">Bibliography and Various Reading,</span>
which supposedly contains all of the text deleted from and preceding the
&ldquo;late&rdquo; revisions. The source of the text is unknown&mdash;while
it contains idiosyncrasies native to only the 1859 first edition
(<span style="font-style: italic">e.g.</span>
&ldquo;she &rsquo;ll&rdquo;), it also features punctuation from later
editions. In short, the Memorial Edition supplement is a hybrid text, and
one that does not record the different editions from which it draws its
content.</p>

<p class="Indent">But, in terms of scholarly and critical editing, Meredith
novels have been neglected on the whole. In 1974, Collie notes: &ldquo;it
is worth mentioning that there have been only two or three serious
twentieth-century attempts to edit single novels by Meredith properly.
Such work remains to be done and one can only regret, as ever, the
re-issuing of unedited books&mdash;a practice which hampers study of
several nineteenth-century novelists.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote28" class="FootnoteLink">28</a>
In 1993, Barbara Rosenbaum writes that there are only three modern critical
editions of Meredith&rsquo;s novels:
<span style="font-style: italic">The Adventures of Harry</span>
Richmond, edited by L. T. Hergenhan (1970);
<span style="font-style: italic">One of Our Conquerors,</span>
edited by Margaret Harris (1975); and previously unpublished portions of
<span style="font-style: italic">The Adventures of Harry Richmond,</span>
edited by Sven-Johan Spanberg (1990). But, Rosenbaum adds, &ldquo;while
these editions discuss the available manuscripts sources, they do not
provide newly-edited texts.&rdquo;
<a href="#Footnote29" class="FootnoteLink">29</a>
Clearly, not everyone agrees on what constitutes a critical edition.
Take, for example, Robert M. Adams&rsquo; edition of
<span style="font-style: italic">The Egoist.</span>
Although it is marketed as a Norton &ldquo;critical edition,&rdquo; it
would be hard to classify the work as &ldquo;critical&rdquo; in terms of
traditional scholarly editing practice. The Adams edition reprints
&ldquo;the authorized edition of 1897,&rdquo; published by Archibald
Constable, without any editorial emendations. (The publisher is not
mentioned anywhere in the textual notes.) The Adams edition offers an
extremely slim two-page historical collation of the 1897 text with the 1879
first edition, which was published by Chapman and Hall (who also goes
unmentioned). The collation contains only substantive variants and offers
no explanation for their
history.<a href="#Footnote30" class="FootnoteLink">30</a>
Still, in 2008 the Adams edition of
<span style="font-style: italic">The Egoist</span> is probably the
most widely read edition of any of Meredith&rsquo;s novels.</p>

<p class="Indent">In the case of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel,</span>
one must choose among radically different texts. Indeed, the idea for this
edition began in response to a practical need. During the spring of 2008, I
attended a graduate-level course taught by Jerome McGann at the University
of Virginia. One of the works the class was assigned to read was
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel.</span>
However, there were some problems in obtaining a text. First, the book was
in print only through generic eLibron, BiblioBazaar, and Kessinger reprints
of previous editions. (We settled on reading the Modern Library edition,
introduced by Lionel Stevenson, and based on the 1859 first edition. Out of
curiosity and for practical purposes, I collated this against the other
copies of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
in order to get a feel for how reliable it was; and, as far as I can tell,
while there are some errors, it is not too bad.) Second, no edition of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel</span>
has taken into account the history of its extensive revisions. One must
choose among three different works: Chapman and Hall 1859; Tauchnitz/Kegan
Paul 1875/1878, and Archibald Constable 1896. Finally, many of the articles
and sources written about the novel&rsquo;s textual history contain errors,
which mislead students and scholars trying to understand the differences
between the revised editions. Lionel Stevenson&rsquo;s introduction, for
example, makes a similar mistake to Collie&rsquo;s; he attributes the
excision of the Grandison chapter to the 1878 Kegan Paul edition. And
nowhere, amid his discussion of the publishing history, does he discuss
Archibald Constable&rsquo;s 1896 edition, with its drastic revisions.</p>

<p class="Indent">Such mistakes are somewhat understandable. The
complexities of these documents are enormous. It is my hope that the current
web archive, which contains documentary editions of the &ldquo;Indicates the
Approaches of Fever&rdquo; chapter from the major texts (and from which I
will begin to create critical editions of the three separate works), will
provide students and scholars with the information they need to begin to
understand the fascinating and tangled history of
<span style="font-style: italic">Richard Feverel.</span></p>

</div>


<div class="FootnoteRegion" style="margin-top: 0.75in">

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote1" id="Footnote1">1</a>
  E. M. Forster,
  <span style="font-style: italic">Aspects of the Novel</span>
  (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954) 89.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote2" id="Footnote2">2</a>
  Virginia Woolf,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Second Common Reader,</span>
  ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1986)
  226.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote3" id="Footnote3">3</a>
  E. M. Forster,
  <span style="font-style: italic">Aspects of the Novel</span>
  (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954) 90.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote4" id="Footnote4">4</a>
  Virginia Woolf,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Second Common Reader,</span>
  ed. Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1986)
  228</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote5" id="Footnote5">5</a>
  Richard C. Stevenson,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Experimental Impulse in George
  Meredith&rsquo;s Fiction</span>
  (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press) 20.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote6" id="Footnote6">6</a>
  End of chapter entitled &ldquo;Celebrates the Breakfast,&rdquo; page 356,
  Modern Library edition. Spelled &ldquo;Kitchener&rdquo; though the famous
  author is Dr Kitchiner, who wrote
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Cook&rsquo;s Oracle.</span></div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote7" id="Footnote7">7</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography,</span>
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 19.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote8" id="Footnote8">8</a>
  C. L. Cline, ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Letters of George Meredith </span>
  (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970) 39.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote9" id="Footnote9">9</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography,</span>
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 19.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote10" id="Footnote10">10</a>
  C. L. Cline, ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Letters of George Meredith </span>
  (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970) 42-43.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote11" id="Footnote11">11</a>
  C. L. Cline, ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Letters of George Meredith </span>
  (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970) 116.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote12" id="Footnote12">12</a>
  C. L. Cline, ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Letters of George Meredith </span>
  (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970) 32.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote13" id="Footnote13">13</a>
  C. L. Cline, ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Letters of George Meredith </span>
  (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970) 478.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote14" id="Footnote14">14</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 20.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote15" id="Footnote15">15</a>
  L. T. Hergenhan, &ldquo;Meredith&rsquo;s Use of Revision: A Consideration
  of the Revisions of &lsquo;Richard Feverel&rsquo; and &lsquo;Evan
  Harrington,&rsquo;
  <span style="font-style: italic">Modern Language Review</span>
  LIX (1964): 539. </div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote16" id="Footnote16">16</a>
  Barbara Rosenbaum, ed. and Richard Pearson, assist. ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">Index of English Literary
  Manuscripts</span>, vol. 4, part 3 (London: Mansell Publishing Limited,
  1993) 337.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote17" id="Footnote17">17</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 20.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote18" id="Footnote18">18</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 246-248.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote19" id="Footnote19">19</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 248-49.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote20" id="Footnote20">20</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 21.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote21" id="Footnote21">21</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 246.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote22" id="Footnote22">22</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 2o.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote23" id="Footnote23">23</a>
  C. L. Cline, ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Letters of George Meredith </span>
  (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970) 935.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote24" id="Footnote24">24</a>
  C. L. Cline, ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">The Letters of George Meredith </span>
  (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970) 1186.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote25" id="Footnote25">25</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 251-53.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote26" id="Footnote26">26</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 242.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote27" id="Footnote27">27</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 266.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote28" id="Footnote28">28</a>
  Michael Collie,
  <span style="font-style: italic">George Meredith: A Bibliography</span>,
  (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974) 5.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote29" id="Footnote29">29</a>
  Barbara Rosenbaum, ed. and Richard Pearson, assist. ed.,
  <span style="font-style: italic">Index of English Literary
  Manuscripts</span>, vol. 4, part 3 (London: Mansell Publishing Limited,
  1993) 337.</div>

<div class="Footnote_Text">
  <a name="Footnote30" id="Footnote30">30</a>
  George Meredith, The Egoist: An Annotated Text, Backgrounds, Criticism,
  Robert M. Adams, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton &amp; Co., 1979).</div>

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